Seven's confidence didn't wane, even in the face of Sheffer and Rodolf's doubt. It may have been because he truly had control over the situation. It may have also had to do with what the cylinder-toting soldier at his side was doing, though.

... What was he doing?

The white canister, which bore significant resemblance to the ones jutting out of the backs of the drone soldiers' heads (though it was a bit larger), had a transparent panel on it through which intense red light shone. If one looked closely, they might see... yet another Chaosol Emerald? How many had Seven found?

"We still have a minute or so before I have to leave," stated Seven with all the nonchalance of saying he had time for another game. "That's time enough to stop this without any... innocent lives lost, if we work together." He looked at Mako in particular, and smiled.

One of his hands glode up to the back of his own head and lifted some of his hair. The soldier next to him jammed the connector on the cylinder into a previously unseen socket hidden there. Seven shuddered; an unnatural light washed over him, and electricity began to surge across his body. He grinned horribly.

Mako gave of got a deep sort of nervous choke, ("Gkk!!") and he took a half-step back, eyes wider than ever before. Every muscle in his body tensed -- it even seemed that his gills flared out for a moment, simply from shock. This was about fifty kinds of not-right. Maybe it was just him, but people weren't supposed to glow like that...

I am going to die. I don't know what's going on, but I am going to die.

Said thought hit him like a bulldozer; but before he could so much as form another thought, he had a bizarrely four-fingered hand pressing a memory drive into his chest.

"Hold this."

The shark gripped it numbly, watching as Rock lunged for Seven, as Rodolf stepped forward in a far more slow, measured manner.

"Well, then that's decided."

And with that, Rodolf put his head down and charged.

There wasn't time enough to tell if Seven was surprised, unfazed, or whatever else. Everything happened so quickly.

One second, they were charging, and the next, Rock was flying back at them.

It wasn't anything of his own will. With what looked like a mere gesture, Seven had stopped Rock in midair with raw electromagnetic force. The simian's metal-shafted boots were going to be his downfall. Rock lashed like a whip, head straight to the metal floor with a metallic pow, then, in less than a second, was sent zooming straight back at his nearest pursuer, Rodolf. It all happened so fast that, unless Rodolf had amazing luck or reflexes one, the bouncing, rolling monkey would probably go right through his legs to take him off his feet before soaring past and being cast headlong into a cluster of steel girders at the tower's center.

Regardless of what happened, Rock bounced to a halt some considerable distance away, lying on his side, facing away, motionless. The sharp "ping" of skull against solid steel had been a horrible-sounding thing; with someone like him, who normally immediately started to move at least a little regardless of the blow, his stillness might have been something to be concerned about.

Meanwhile, Seven, surrounded in a very Jam-like orb of electricity and chaos energy, and only beginning to feel out the extent of his powers in his new, ridiculously-charged-up state, somehow brimmed with more confidence than he ever had before, showing all his pearly whites as he so very easily evaded the crystal hedgehog.

"Toro, toro!" he taunted, hopping effortlessly about like some sort of man-sized flea. If given a gap, he'd stop maybe thirty feet away. "You can't even touch me. You'll never get up any speed in all that glitter... Are you really gonna make me break it off of you?"

Sheffer's spear bounced off of the spherical shield harmlessly. No, the electricity wasn't interacting with the hedgehog's bizarre chaos minerals or whatever in any way, but there was more to the shield than mere electrical charge, much like in the case of the original lightning ring owner. That meant Seven didn't even have to move yet. Actually... he chose not to at all.

"I can do that, too," he replied vaguely to Sheffer's attack as he reached both hands over his head. Steel screamed, rivets popped, and the structure shuddered (pray for the bomb's safety) as an entire multi-ton girder, bigger around than the kid's head, ripped free and barreled down like a spear straight at the stony hedgehog from an angle above. Of course, for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction; in order to pull down that hard, he had to pull at the floor, too, resulting in a large portion of the surface they stood on bulging upward and sloping part of the battlefield, with groans of metal and yet more pops of rivets a-many.

Seven's own "spear" dug a nice trench in the roof whether or not it smashed its hedgehog target, but the destruction wouldn't stop there; utter chaos befell their little battlefield as yet more beams (many of them smaller, but nonetheless heavy and deadly) tore down, and began flying everywhere like some sort of gigantic scattershot.

Anyone who got hit could easily end up feeling much like Rock—maybe not quite so bad, but not far from it, armor or not.

"I have to—" Coop looked up, and then down, in momentary indecision. The eerie glow shining out from the windows below had stopped him in his tracks.

"Three minutes," he stared down. He stared up at the top of the tower.

"Three minutes."

The tower swayed. A metallic screech filled the air, and the beams of the tower buzzed. Coop lost his footing on the beam's rain-slicked surface, and he hung from his hand—still grabbing onto the beam in spite of the bone-penetrating vibration that threatened to numb anything that came into contact with it.

Coop felt the blood drain away from his head in a moment of pure, heart-freezing shock. This was it. They were all going to die.

He swung there, for a second or two, dangling in the wind. He waited for a horrific explosion, or a flash of light, or something.

Then he felt his face get hot under the rain, as the adrenaline reflex kicked in.

"No," he said again. "No, no, no, no, no."

He rocketed upwards, and entered the tower—stopping on the threshold of one of the broken windows as he saw the Koala kneeling over the unlocked and opened case.

"What's going on?" he asked, "Did you disarm it?"

Coop coasted down from the windows to look at the case. He stared at it for a moment. He put his face in his hands and took a long breath. He took his hands down and stared at the inside of the case again.

At some point it had been a GUN kit bomb, created for quick deployment and demolition in secured environments or in the field, but it had been tampered with far too much to be considered remotely based on a schematic any more. The insides of the bomb had been pulled out and strung around the inside of the case, where—mounted on various point around the inside of the box, wafer-thin white chips with gleaming brass bolts tipping them waited quietly—vibration sensors, passively waiting for someone or something to jar the device too much. They had been daisy-chained around the inside of the box, and each one had a wire stringing back to the centre of the device, where hasty rewiring had removed diodes and transistors from the board's circuits and replaced them with electronics to accommodate the new pieces.

The emeralds—the remaining chaosol emeralds that had been hunted for by nearly every faction on the island, were sitting there, in the box, wrapped in badly-rolled-out sheets of plastic explosives that had been bound together with steel strapping, ratcheted into which was a metal frame which held a computer. Inserted into the computer were three separate batteries, the wires from which crossed each other in a horrible, snaggled love triangle of trigger fuses—each one guarding the last against being cut.

While the computer had obviously been modified to accommodate the horrible chain of sensors, the circuit board of the computer itself had been turned up-side down, facing into the center of the explosives device so that none of the components could be visually identified.

"Nnnngh," said Coop, and then:

"Nnnnngh."

His head remained bowed, as he spoke quietly—possibly to the koala, possibly to himself.

"I don't think I'm gonna get this," he said.